RITCHIE BLACKMORE’S 7 MOST ESSENTIAL SONGS
Guitar god, Deep Purple guru, and Rainbow ruler Ritchie Blackmore turns 70 today. As an axe-wielder and a gentleman, Blackmore is one of rock’s supreme beings—a superhuman giant in that rarified realm alongside Tony Iommi, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck, whose influence touches the frets of every hard rock and heavy metal six-string-slinger who will ever follow in his musical wake.
Let’s celebrate Ritchie Blackmore’s 70th with a chronological playlist of seven essential songs that bear his immortal touch.
1. “Hush” – Deep Purple (1968)
Ritchie Blackmore made his initial professional bones as an in-demand studio session player, doing particularly standout work forvisionary producer Joe Meek for whom he performed on remarkable tracks by (among others) proto-metal horror-pop weirdoScreaming Lord Sutch.
So when Chris Curtis, drummer for the Searchers (of “Needles and Pins” fame), sought in 1967 to assemble a psych-rock supergroup, Blackmore was naturally recruited on guitar following the signing of Hammond organ wizard Jon Lord.
Blackmore and Lord hit if off so completely that, even when Curtis self-destructed, the guitarist and keyboardist elected to continue building their own perfect beast of a band. Thus was Deep Purple born (the name comes of which from the title ofRitchie’s grandmother’s favorite song).
The group’s debut LP, Shades of Deep Purple, contained the hit “Hush,” a barnburner that skyrocketed to #4 on the U.S. pop charts and launched the band on the myriad twists and turns to come over their next five decades as continually making hard rock history.
2. “Speed King” – Deep Purple (1970)
After a succession of commercial disappointments that might have undone a lesser rock force, Deep Purple upped their game by recruiting vocalist Ian Gillan and soldiering on, in 1970, with the album that would establish their wide-open heavy metal sound, In Rock.
“Speed King” kicks of In Rock with a tidal wave of Blackmore guitar histrionics followed by a hypnotic Jon Lord organ solo. The full band then fully explodes and Ian Gillan erupts like a volcano god leap leaping to life, reducing all he touches with his voice to hot, bubbling lava.
With “Speed King,” the band made it clear that the at-times too polite psychedelia of Deep Purple Mach I is being buried, as you listen, by this avalanche of unstoppable rock. From there, the onslaught just kept on coming.
3. “Smoke on the Water” – Deep Purple (1972)
It is the riff of riffs. Those thirteen down-tuned guitar strokes that open “Smoke on the Water” have ruled, since its release via the 1972 album Machine Head, as the absolute immediate go-to move for any and all hard rock guitarists, be they just beginners trying to wrap their fingers around an instrument’s neck or superstars noodling around on their longtime money-makers.
In terms of specific doom metal supremacy, the “Smoke on the Water” riff is rivaled only by “Black Sabbath” and “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. Still, even those masterworks don’t just get automatically played every time anyone, anywhere just happens to pick up a guitar.
“Smoke on the Water” itself maintains its initial guitar blast’s sense of wonder, recounting in vivid and precise detail a December 4, 1971 event when the group all went down to Montreux, Switzerland on the Lake Geneva shoreline to make records with a mobile.
Deep Purple’s plans went up in flames after a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention held in the casino complex where Purple was recording got done in when “some stupid with a flare gun/burned the place to the ground.” All anybody could do then was just stare stunned at, indeed, the smoke on the water.
The sheer supreme metal might of “Smoke on the Water” is encapsulted by the fact that it renders In Rock’s mind-melting opening cut, “Highway Star,” merely the second most awesome song on the album.
